Last Sunday, I shared with you some of the few lessons I have learned in ministry so far. One of those lessons I preached about was “keeping the main thing the main thing.” Well, one of the “main things,” not only here at First UMC Plant City but in our Christian faith, is the Bible. 

As Christians, we believe that the Bible is God’s written revelation of who He is and what He has done in redemptive history. We believe that the Bible is “God-breathed” and gets its true, authoritative, powerful, holy character from God Himself, who inspired human authors through the power of the Holy Spirit to write exactly what He wanted them to write. We believe that God did not simply just dictate words to the Biblical authors but rather He worked through the Biblical authors’ unique personalities and circumstances. Therefore, Scripture is both fully human and fully divine. It is both the testimony of men and women to God’s revelation, and it is also God’s divine revelation itself. 

In addition, the Bible is historically true, it is eternally trustworthy, and it is indeed good for preaching. We believe the Bible is good for reproof and correction. We believe it is good and the final authority in regards to all things pertaining to life. We believe the Bible is living and active, which means that it is very applicable to each one of our lives today in 2025. It is our sacred canon and, thus, the decisive source of our Christian witness and the authoritative measure of the truth in our beliefs. All-in-all, as Christians, we believe the Bible. We stand on it. We believe what the Bible says about itself is true. It is the primary source where we go to learn about God. It is primarily where we go to help us “keep the main thing, the main thing.”

In this life, there are a million questions that we are going to answer. We must make decisions every day and the questions that we ask and answer in our lives are not equally weighted. Answering the questions, "What am I going to eat for lunch" and "Whom am I going to marry,” carry a different amount of weight and they have a different amount of impact on the trajectory of our lives. 

Of all the questions that we will ask and answer in our lives, there's one question that weighs more than any other question. There's one question that has more significance and more impact on the trajectory of our lives than any other question that we will ever ask and answer. For most of us, the question is not, “Is the Bible historically true?” The world acknowledges that Christ did indeed live on and walked this earth. That is not really what we have to wrestle with. 

For most of is, the question that we have to wrestle with is this: “Who is Jesus Christ of Nazareth?” The Bible makes it very clear who Jesus was and is. The Bible, God’s Word of Truth, tells us this: Jesus Christ of Nazareth was God in flesh and stepped down off His Heavenly throne to rescue the world. Jesus Christ of Nazareth, because He is God, lived a perfect life, died the death humanity deserved, and conquered sin and death through His resurrection so that we could be forgiven and by grace through faith live forever with God. That’s what the Bible tells us.

Who do you say that He is?